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Should there be a property flood registry?

In the wake of the floods that ravaged Alberta and Ontario last year, some homeowners called for a special registry for the properties affected by such damage in recent years. But is this the right way to deal with this?

Video transcript below:

Reporter: The floods of 2013 cause havoc for many homeowners. The fear of a repeat freak flood play on every buyer’s mind. Some are demanding a registry of flood damaged properties, but is that really the answer? We find out in this week’s episode of Investor Insight on CREW TV.

Buyers have a right to know every detail of the house and especially if there is flood damage. An inspection is often enough to placate some, but now there are calls for a flood registry, is this a practical solution?

Ricky Chadha, Broker, Real Lepage Estate RealtyRicky: In theory I think online registry would be a good idea, but I believe that there is already so many registries out there operating in different in silos, so you have your, you know your grow op registry right now, it would be wonderful if they can get them all together in one registry, so people aren’t holding different data with different interests and another consideration is, for Investment Properties, if you start to have these registries, how many of the apartments in the province, in the country are legal to begin with, so that might just open another can of worms.

Reporter: Some get it with floods once a year, others once a lifetime. How can you get a registry that is fair for all?

Brendan Powell, Sales Representative, the BREL teamBrendan: You might have somebody who lives on a flood plain that continuously floods you know every few years and nothing is ever done about it. That’s not the same thing as for example somebody who lives on a street that was old sewers and they have a regular kind of flooding problem on that street and then one of the good things is that the city could use that for public works and then go in and say replace the sewers and once they replace sewers, the problem that caused the flooding is now gone, but those houses might have a permanent stigma attached to them even though the problem is now remediated.

So you’ve got, you know we had a flood in, we have flood in the summer, there were a lot of houses that were affected and some of them did amazing remediation, fixed everything, fixed the root of the cause and it will likely not happen again and other ones might be in a really dangerous place for repeated flooding and have done nothing. So as long as they’re not treated the same, as long as there is some room for context then I think it’s a good thing.

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